Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Donald Trump is losing it quickly now, going on a Twitter tirade today calling "Never Trumper" Republicans "human scum" and signaling to his base that's it open season against them as he adds to his extensive enemies' list.

President Trump attacked acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor as a "Never Trumper" in a tweet Wednesday, after Taylor testified to House investigators that Trump had directly linked military aid to Ukraine investigating his political opponents. 

Never Trumper Republican John Bellinger, represents Never Trumper Diplomat Bill Taylor (who I don’t know), in testimony before Congress! Do Nothing Democrats allow Republicans Zero Representation, Zero due process, and Zero Transparency. Does anybody think this is fair? Even though there was no quid pro quo, I’m sure they would like to try. Worse than the Dems!

What they're saying: Earlier Wednesday, Trump tweeted that "Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!" 

Indeed, the stage is being set for more stochastic terrorism, and the closer Trump gets to being impeached and possibly removed, the more insane things are going to get.

End Times broadcaster, rabid anti-Semite, and ardent conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles warned on his “TruNews” program last night that if President Donald Trump is removed from office, Trump supporters who “know how to fight” will hunt down Democratic legislators and kill them.

“If they take him out, there is going to be violence in America,” Wiles said. “There are people in this country—veterans, cowboys, mountain men, guys that know how to fight—and they’re going to make a decision that the people that did this to Donald Trump are not going to get away with it and they’re going to hunt them down.”

“I’m serious,” he continued. “If these people in Washington think that they are going to get away with it, it’s not going to happen. The Trump supporters are going to hunt them down. It’s going to happen and this country is going to be plunged into darkness and they brought it upon themselves because they won’t back off.”

Wiles said that Democrats have “waged war” against Trump voters for three years in an effort to undo the 2016 election and Trump supporters “are fed up with it and they know that if they get away with this, there is no country left.”

“They are going to go on a rampage and you’re not going to be able to put it back in the bottle,” Wiles said.

“Once the blood starts flowing, it’s nearly impossible to stop,” added co-host Edward Szall.

I fully expect this message to end up on Hannity before the end of the year, possibly before the end of the month at the clip impeachment is proceeding.  And I don't want to hear that "They won't try anything" because we already have dead journalists and civilians killed by Trump's rabid base.

Violence is going to happen, almost guaranteed.

Longtime major league umpire Rob Drake tweeted that he planned to buy an assault rifle "because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020", according to a copy of the tweet obtained by ESPN.

The tweet, which was deleted soon after it was posted late Tuesday, followed one earlier in the night regarding the House of Representatives' impeachment proceedings with President Donald Trump.

The second tweet, which remains active on Drake's account @thedrake30, says: "You can't do an impeachment inquiry from the basement of Capital Hill without even a vote! What is going on in this country?"

Drake did not return phone and text messages.

A spokesman for Major League Baseball said the league is aware of the tweet and looking into it. Joe West, the president of the Major League Baseball Umpires Association, declined comment when reached by phone.

Yes, a lot of these are sick, disgusting fantasies.  But even if a small fraction act on these fantasies, the Trump impeachment proceedings are going to be blood-soaked.

Eric Metaxas, an author and nationally syndicated religious right talk radio host, told Fox News legal and political analyst Gregg Jarrett that President Donald Trump had been the target of a mass delusion campaign akin to Nazi Germany’s and that unless people wake up to that fact, “it’s the end of America.”

Metaxas interviewed Jarrett in-studio on his show “The Eric Metaxas Radio Show,” and footage of the interview was uploaded to YouTube last week. The two discussed the premise of Jarrett’s new book, “Witch Hunt,” which seeks to convince readers that the intelligence community launched a misinformation campaign to convince Americans that Trump is a traitor to the United States. Throughout the interview, Metaxas praised Jarrett for his writing and appearances on Fox News’ “Hannity” program to promote his narrative, and he expressed his personal agreement with Jarrett’s interpretations.

“People often ask the question, and I’ve written a book about it,” Metaxas said, referring to a book he wrote about a theologian and spy who fought Nazis. “How did the Nazis take over Germany? How did it happen? How did it happen that the Salem witch trials—how do people get crazy, and there’s this mass lemming-like run toward something that’s a chimera, an illusion, and yet it happens over and over in history.”

“And I agree with you in the thesis of your book that there’s no doubt that that is what has just happened, and it’s actually, of course, not over yet,” Metaxas said. “We still have people who, the moment the Mueller report came out, they kept grasping at straws, grasping at straws. When there were no longer straws to grasp, you know, they leaped over to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. They really, they don’t stop.”

Metaxas continued, “And I want to say really bluntly to my audience: You don’t have to like Trump. In fact, you can hate Trump. That’s your right as an American. But when we see this level of corruption happening in our government, when we see journalists abdicate their sacred calling as journalists to follow a narrative, I have to say every American should be scared, because if you do not undo this, if you don’t wake up from the dream, it’s the end of America.”

The shock talk AM radio nutjobs are openly preparing their listeners for armed insurrection.  This was always going to be the result of any effort to remove Trump, by either impeachment or by vote in 2020, and anyone who doesn't see this is burying their head in the sand.

We have to stay the course, but it's going to come at a cost.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Today, we were supposed to have a deposition by Pentagon official Laura Cooper about how Trump delayed military aid to the Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensksy announced a corruption investigation into Hunter Biden. 

Laura Cooper -- the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia -- is set to appear even though the Defense Department told Congress that it would not comply with a House subpoena to provide documents related to the freezing of US security aid to Ukraine. 

Cooper is currently believed to be voluntarily appearing before the three House committees leading the Democratic impeachment inquiry and the Pentagon has not yet sought to block her testimony. She will be accompanied by a personal lawyer, according to defense officials. 

As a top official overseeing US policy towards Ukraine, Cooper would have been involved with overseeing US military assistance to Kiev, assistance such as the $250 million aid package that was frozen by the Trump Administration despite the Pentagon's recommendation that it go forward. 

What motivated the White House to order that freeze has formed a central part of the impeachment inquiry into Trump. 

And I say supposed to hear from Cooper because a couple dozen House Republicans, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, stormed the hearing in a banana republic playbook move ordered by Donald Trump.

A protest by a group of Republican lawmakers temporarily put on hold the impeachment hearing testimony of a Pentagon official who oversaw military assistance to Ukraine.

About two dozen GOP House members, who are objecting to the closed-door hearings led by Democrats, barged into the secure hearing room, some of them “shouting, screaming” at the “injustice being done to the president,” said Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly, a member of the Oversight panel.

“It’s like a protest movement,” said Lacy Clay of Missouri, a Democrat on the Oversight Committee, who likened the protest to a sit-in and said the GOP members remained inside.

Only members of the three House committees -- Democrats and Republicans -- are allowed in the “sensitive compartmented information facility,” known as a SCIF. Access is limited to people with security clearances to discuss classified material that isn’t open to public view.

“We kept demanding they let us in, and they said no,” said Representative Debbie Lesko, an Arizona Republican.

Republicans have repeatedly complained that the closed-door hearings are unfair to Trump. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has said that following the initial investigation stage, he plans to call some of the witnesses back for public hearings.

Connolly said the Republicans entered the secure area and walked into the room where a Pentagon official, Laura Cooper, was scheduled to testify. The GOP members were carrying electronic devices, which are barred from the secure area, he said.

“That SCIF is used by Congress for a lot of highly classified purposes. To compromise that to make a point is deeply troubling,” said Connolly. “They literally stormed the door when it was open.”

To recap, House Republicans broke the law by doing this.  And of course, Donald Trump blessed the move and coordinated it with House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy.
 

Trump had advance knowledge and supported a protest by Republicans who told him they planned to barge into a secure hearing room on Capitol Hill where Democrats are holding impeachment testimonies, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Trump on Tuesday met with about 30 House Republicans at the White House to talk about the situation in Syria and the impeachment inquiry. During a nearly two-hour meeting, which focused mostly on the impeachment inquiry, lawmakers shared their plans to storm into the secure room, the people said. Trump supported the action, saying he wanted the transcripts released because they will exonerate him, the people said.

So Cooper's deposition has been delayed for who knows how long, Trump basically ordered literal obstruction of justice by disrupting legal testimony against him, and Republicans now know they can bring everything to a crashing halt.  And all this happened as Nancy Pelosi was in Baltimore for her older brother Tommy's funeral.

If you had any doubts that yesterday's testimony from Bill Taylor was the smoking impeachment gun, this response proves it was.  Democrats say they will continue the deposition later today, so we'll see what the Insane Clown Caucus does in response.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Yesterday's back-breaking testimony by acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor was so utterly daming that even the awful John Podhoretz is freely admitting that Donald Trump's impeachment is now assured.

There were three defenses of Trump following the revelations of the “whistleblower” and the phone-call transcript of the conversation between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine. The first was that he is only interested in investigating corruption relating to the 2016 election. The second is that even though Trump himself said he wanted the Ukranian to do him a favor, there was no quid pro quo. The third is that the only thing Trump was trading for was a White House visit, which is no great shakes. 

There’s no need to talk about the “whistleblower” and his findings any longer, and there’s no need for the whistleblower to be heard any further. We have a veteran U.S. diplomat on the record saying that a Trump intimate told him Trump was holding up Congressionally authorized and appropriated military aid to Ukraine because he wanted a public statement from the Zelensky government that it was investigating Joe Biden’s son. 

Taylor said this of a September 1 phone call with Gordon Sondland, our ambassador to the European Union about the $275 million in U.S. security assistance to Ukraine as well as a possible meeting between Trump and Ukranian president Zelensky: 

“Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelenskyy was dependent on a public announcement of investigations—in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.” 

So that’s it. Unless Trump and Sondland deny this, and offer evidence that Taylor is wrong or lying, we now have contemporaneous confirmation that the president intended to hold up military aid to the Ukranians to secure domestic political advantage. 

That’s the ballgame. That’s impeachment. In doing this Trump was contravening U.S. law, which does not give the president the right to deny Ukraine the money appropriated by Congress for Ukraine. 

Whether what Trump does obliges the Senate to remove him from the presidency will be up to Republicans in the Senate to decide at the trial that will follow what I think is the now-inevitable impeachment. The fact that the aid to Ukraine has in fact gone through despite Trump’s illegitimate temporary suspension may be the straw the GOP will grasp to prevent his conviction in that trial. But that’s no defense of Trump’s actions. If I’m right, they will, in effect, have to concede the wrongdoing and say it is too minor to lead to such an extreme sanction. So Trump won’t be the first president to be removed from office. He will, however, be the third to be impeached. And, as I said, that will be bad enough.

The shift from "will he be impeached" to "will he leave office" is no small feat, but that's where I think we're at this week, a corner turned and a path now chosen.  If Bill Barr has some surprise sealed indictments of Obama-era intelligence officials up his sleeve, we'll see them soon, I'd reckon.

StupidiNews!

• A new Credit Suisse report finds that for the first time, China's share of the wealthiest ten percent of people on Earth outnumbers that of America.
• The Louvre in Paris is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci this week with the largest display of known works by the Italian Renaissance master ever assembled.
• Attorneys General from dozens of US states will be meeting in Colorado next month to discuss the landmark anti-trust case by 48 states and the District of Columbia against Google.
• The UK Parliament has blocked PM Boris Johnson's Brexit plan scheduled for next week, all but assuring an EU Jan. 31 delay date and Johnson following through on his snap elections threat.
• A federal appeals court has ruled that the $35 billion class-action suit against Facebook over facial recognition software and privacy violations can go forward.